AYESHACURRY

This September, a Bay Area chef on the rise serves up a month’s worth of lessons. Culinary School à la Curry is now in sessionIn 2013, for one of Ayesha Curry’s first tutorials on her lifestyle blog, then titled Little Lights of Mine, she’s baking an organic, banana-based first-birthday cake for her daughter, Riley. De-spite the distinctly DIY quality of the shoot—the shaky camera swings in and out of focus; the all-but-bare-faced blogger’s voice-overs are self-consciously emotive—Curry is mes-merizingly, authentically telegenic. By the time she declares, one minute in, “This cake is awesome,” we believe her, and we also want to be her best friend. But Curry recalls that early effort as “terrible.” Then she clarifies: “The cake was great. The video was awful.”

Although Toronto-born, North Carolina–raised Curry—whose husband is the Golden State Warriors’ two-time NBA MVP Stephen “Steph” Curry; the pair has been the unoffi-cial poster couple for the league’s Lean In ini-tiative supporting partnership equality—spent her late teens and early twenties pursuing acting in Los Angeles, shooting commercials and small movie and TV roles (an appearance on the Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana among them), cooking has always felt “natu-ral” to her in a way that, she says, “the hoopla” of Hollywood didn’t. But it wasn’t until she had Riley, and started looking for work that could keep her closer to home, that she decided to start the blog. What she learned during her “little, short-lived acting career” paid off: In the three years since she posted that first lo-fi

SEPTEMBER 12ORGANIZE THE CHAOSWith cooking, half the battle is getting the setup right. Curry offers five tips to put your kitchen in prime working order.

SEPTEMBER 5BRUNCH DATEAt-home brunch is the new dinner party. Earn your hip hostess Brownie badge with Curry’s impressive—and impressively easy—menu.

SEPTEMBER 19SURF AND TURFWith Curry’s no-fuss, fail-safe rules, master perfectly cooked meat and fish, once and for all.

SEPTEMBER 26HOW TO PREGAME…and postgame! Curry outlines two great recipes: one to fuel you up before the gym, Ballet Beautiful class, or basketball court—and one to help with recovery afterward.

video, she’s honed her culinary aesthetic (relaxed, healthy, fla-vorful); landed a local-network Bay Area pregame cooking seg-ment, Cookin’ With the Currys; and filmed a yet-to-be-sched-uled Food Network show.

Curry’s first cookbook, The Seasoned Life, out September 20, will reflect not only her diverse culinary heritage—her mom is Jamai-can and Chinese, her dad Polish and Afri-can American—but also the influence of her adopted home, the San Francisco Bay Area. “L.A. gets the attention,” she says, “so it’s cool to shed that light on the Bay.” And she’s doing so in more ways than one: Earlier this sum-mer, she teamed up with revered Michelin- star chef Michael Mina to launch a wildly suc-

cessful, “globally inspired” pop-up bar-becue restaurant, International Smoke, in the Marina District—a full month of reservations sold out in the first seven minutes they were available, and rapper (and Bay Area enthusi-ast) Drake showed up for the June 4 opening.

This month, Curry takes up a new resi-dency as ELLE.com’s expert in comfort-food cooking. If the way to your heart is through your stomach (and your mind!), her killer combo of smarts and kitchen confidence will win you over in no time.—Keziah Weir

COOKING WITH CURRY

FIRST LOVE“I’ve been cooking since

I was 12 years old. I wish somebody

would’ve told me, ‘You can make a career

out of this.’ ”

EACH WEEK, TUNE IN FOR CURRY’S CRASH COURSE IN EASY-TO-MAKE EATS

LONG DIVISION“I feel very blessed to

have him come home from working out all day and be like, ‘I got

this.’ We split all of the hard work when it

comes to home life. It’s great.”

From right: Curry with her tools of choice; Curry, Riley, and Steph in 2015

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